Schoolchildren’s Career Trajectory Рlanning: Focus on “Want”, “Can” and “Need”

Abstract

Introduction: future youth career trajectory planning in Russian society is conditioned on by a strong gap in supply and demand in a labor market and educational services market in terms of its professional qualification structure. There are several reasons for such gap but one of them is that pupils’ vocational guidance is traditionally aimed at university or college choice for education rather than building conscious individual career trajectory taking into account occupations demand. The goal of the article is to justify the need to adjust benchmarks for early career guidance and build it on the basis of future career path designing taking into account all career guidance. Materials and Methods: the research methodology is based on a transparent information environment principle application that takes into account all three components of professional choice: “want”, “can” and “need”. This principle is rooted on a comparative theoretical analysis of foreign and domestic approaches to vocational guidance. Schoolchildren survey results gained during republican vocational guidance lesson (Republic of Karelia), graduates’ survey results obtained in a framework of federal graduates employability monitoring, statistics indicators on a labour market and education system are widely used as empirical basis of the research. Results: the authors both developed and implemented a transparent information environment principle in a form of the “My Career” Internet resource allowing each type of user (pupils, parents, teachers) to return repeatedly to a variety of opportunities on individual’s professional development in a labour market. The logic of vocational guidance sequent measures in terms of career guidance has been substantiated starting from an occupation choice through employer choice and ending with a choice of vocational education place. Discussion and Conclusions: the research results will be both useful for teachers and coaches since they justify sequence actions in vocational guidance activities implementation as well as methodological support for career-oriented lessons. Development and adaptation of the developed toolkit allow to carry out quantitative assessment of career guidance performance. Further toolkit dissemination will be based on a transparent information environment extending into other Russian Federation regions and access realizing to web-resources within mobile devices.

Keywords

• vocational guidance
• pupils
• professional self-determination
• educational path
• professional counselling performance